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2015 Claiming Citizenship, Vancouver Conference Presentation

Building an interactive coaching tool
to facilitate

the transition to Individual Funding

Annick
Janson, Research Associate, Centre for Applied
Cross-cultural Research, Victoria University of Wellington and CEO, Ecosynergy
Group, Hamilton, New Zealand.

This presentation outlined how collecting, analyzing
and disseminating stories from Individualized Funding (IF) users can support
transitioning to self-direction. A large body of evidence is emerging describing the
Social Impact that this transition has created – through families reporting
multiple ways of leading social change and making a difference in their
communities whilst living a meaningful life. People sharing their stories often
inspires others to act, and illustrates the transformation possible with
individualised funding.

4. Illustrate the impact that Individualised
funding has on people’s lives

Collecting stories:
All 45 participants in a Consumer Leadership Development programme reflected on
the novel ideas they explored whilst transitioning to IF. The researcher adopted
a narrative interviewing methodology (Béres, 2014, White and Epston, 1990)
specifically designed and tested to capture participants’ tacit knowledge
(Janson and Davies, 2014). IF users described their first challenge: to
understand their agency in shaping their ‘good life’ and grasp the range of the
new options open to them.

Analysing stories:

This novel procedure involves processing video interview
data through thematic analysis and subsequently post-producing it to best serve
knowledge-building. Participants tell their stories in their own voice as
opposed to through text summaries and have commented that they feel well
represented. The knowledge that is important for people to share about
Individualized Funding spans across four areas: Building natural
supports/networks, Mobility and technology, A place to call home and Being
productive.

Video narratives were embedded in an attractive flexible
tool to be introduced in conversation and thereafter emailed to users learning
from peer stories.

These stories also function to illustrate the
transformational impact that using Individualised Funding has on people’s
lives.

Story-sharing:

Sharing knowledge through stories is perceived as
critical to build capacity in the disability sector, but there are significant
limitations to this sharing happening face to face. Accessing peer stories
electronically overcomes some of these limitations and enables people to be
inspired into action. Our audience has commented on the fact that they engage
with these video clips as the combination of sound and body language of people
sharing what new opportunities opened up to them in the transition to
self-direction has many advantages over text-based stories. Participants stress
that this dissemination mode makes unique contributions over receiving
information from professionals – peer stories contain ‘tacit knowledge’ viz.
knowledge that is tried and tested’ (Nonaka and Teece, 2001).

Data collected and analysed via Google analytics help
develop our understanding about how participants reach the video clips, the
learning paths they follow after viewing them and how they gradually build
their knowledge by following associated hyperlinks. The project infographics
(attached) illustrates radically different learning paths for large subgroups
in our audience. For instance, whilst 26% of our audience were emailed the story
links, another 19% went on to listen to other stories from the referral end
screen that YouTube offers when a story is finished, whilst a further 12% actively
searched for such materials on YouTube. The latter two figures reveal that
YouTube is a powerful engagement conduit for family story-sharing for almost a
third of our audience.

This indicates how social media can contribute to our
aims of distributing these stories - independently of any active dissemination
effort on our part. Another point of interest is the rise of listeners’ numbers
who access the YouTube stories via mobile devices (26% as opposed to an
observed 15% a year ago).

We adopt Collaborative Consumption models (Botsman and Rogers,
2010) and plan to further describe how user-to-user knowledge spreads through
social media, via the ever-increasing adoption of mobile devices.

This research, commissioned by Manawanui InCharge, New
Zealand, produced an interactive multimedia tool designed to facilitate a
challenging transition through the effective dissemination of targeted peer
knowledge. Professional coaches can facilitate the adoption of this knowledge
transfer tool by pointing families to those stories that are most relevant to
them. This can potentially accelerate independent and efficient follow on
capacity building processes.